Freecycle

[ewx]

1. It's very high volume. Fortunately I was warned of this in advance and set up filtering arrangements pre-emptively.

2. You have to mess around with Yahoo's web interface just to subscribe. I know there's a lot of poor mailing list interfaces out there but you can certainly do better than this.

3. The (global) member FAQ suggests combining multiple items into one email (s11). Based on my experience I don't believe this is good advice.

Firstly, some of the responses are at best vague on which items they wanted. In practice this meant I favoured the people making more specific requests and wasn't in the end left with excessive vagueness to guess at, but still, life would have been rather easier without that step.

(When one is giving away useful things for free I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the requester to make some effort to be specific!)

Secondly I'm not convinced that it achieves the intended effect of saving the readers' time. It's stated as cutting down the number of emails but of course message count is only a proxy for the real scarce resource here: human lifetime. Certainly a worthwhile goal, given there's thousands of readers, but only good advice if it actually succeeds.

If all the items offered (among a group of messages) are in the subject lines then you can read them straight off the list of subject lines and carry out bulk deletion: I can read N lines and perform a single UI action to delete them all.

But for each messages where the subject line says "various items" you have to specifically select that message and read the individual line items. That's an extra UI action to select the message, and a pair of visual shifts (from subjects to body and back) for each such message.

So if there are N items and and M "various item" messages, you've got N+M+1 UI actions (including the bulk delete at the end) and 2M visual shifts to process the lot. N's a given, so to minimize reader time and and effort spent all you can do is minimize M.

My immediate personal experience, theorizing aside, was that I quickly started ignoring 'OFFERED: various items' rather than digging into the details of what they were. That doesn't help anyone.

4. You can give away things I thought were unshiftable - my old monitors went out the door last night.

5. It really helps if you get your own address right.

Comments

[sweh.livejournal.com]

I had a Pentium Pro 200 with 64Mb RAM, 4Gb disk and MGA graphics card. 5 people asked for it. Yowsers.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Worth remembering that you could do quite a lot with the machines of 1996 and not all of those applications have gone away or inflated in requirements to the point you need modern systems for them. Still, I do wonder what possible use people are getting out of some of my cast-offs.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I installed RedHat 9 on it (I don't think Fedora would install 'cos of memory) just so it had an OS, and whoever took it away could install whatever version of Windows they wanted on it.

I remember when 64Mb RAM was a lot (my first i386 machine had 4Mb, which I later upgraded to 8Mb; my first i486 had 16Mb; this was the next machine, wow 4 times more memory!). My current machine has 4Gb. Even my EEEPc has 512Mb (which I've just ordered 2Gb for). Wheeee

[ewx.livejournal.com]

My Mac has as much L2 cache as my first PC had RAM in total (8MB). I'm in the process of upgrading its RAM to 6GB, which is not far off the size of the oldest hard disk I still have in (occasional) service...

[nevboo.livejournal.com]

I'd like it better if I could offer things without being subscribed but I realise this is unlikely to happen. In the end I subscribe when I want to offer something and unsubscribe asap as even in digest mode there are more message per day than I can deal with even filtered! I end up sending all straight to trash and then searching Yahoo search when I am looking for something (almost never).

[pm215]

The Reading Freecycle (also a yahoo group) has an option to be subscribed but not receive any mail (you tell it you want to read via the web interface or something), which if provided for Cam. freecycle might do what you want.

[rmc28]

I can confirm that the Cambridge group has the option to be subscribed but not get any mail. To quote our standard moderator message "After you have logged in, on the group webpage there is an "Edit Membership" option in the white bar towards the top of your screen (by your name). If you click there it lets you make changes to your email delivery."

[nevboo.livejournal.com]

Oh! thanks! I shall use that in future

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I hate Freecycle. You get lots of mails from people who never bother to arrange to pick things up. Throwing it in the bin takes 2 minutes. Freecycling something takes an hour or two.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

This lot all turned up to collect within a week. The only item still outstanding is delayed due to point 5 above (and was actually via ucam.adverts.giveaway in any case).

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

I freecycled a bunch of stuff when I moved house last time but I found it a lot of hassle.

I went for the multi-item offer, and I found

- people will come out for 2 or 3 things that they wouldn't bother coming to collect individually
- but then I had a massive logistics hassle with overlapping requests

I've just started reading freecycle again, and agree with the "various" items thing. Gmail also only displays as much of the title as it can fit on the screen (i.e. I can't scroll horizontally to get the rest) which results in occasional hilarity along the lines of Offered: Various Girls or Offered: Brother but is mostly annoying.

All I really want is a (computer) keyboard though, so I could just use gmail's search.

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

when I moved this time I took the bags around to charity shops instead: (a) it's easier and (b) well, charity. But I think some of the crap I shifted last time a charity shop wouldn't have been able to do anything with.

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

oh yeah: someone said somewhere that you can actually subscribe to yahoo mailing lists by sending an email to group-subscribe@yahoo, they just don't tell you this: I don't know if this true.

[pne.livejournal.com]

someone said somewhere that you can actually subscribe to yahoo mailing lists by sending an email to group-subscribe@yahoo, they just don't tell you this

That was my thought, too.

I don't know if this true.

ISTR I did this at least once (and later ran into funny situations when I tried to access that group via the web since the subscription was in a sort of funny state since it was tied to my email address but not my Yahoo ID) - but I wouldn't be surprised if it depends on the group (i.e. some might let you subscribe by email and others might not).

[rmc28]

Yes, it is. In fact it says so on the page http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cambridgefreecycle/ in the section Group Email Addresses, specifically

Subscribe: cambridgefreecycle-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Unsubscribe: cambridgefreecycle-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

[caliston.livejournal.com]

I don't know if the Cambridge group is the one you're interested in, but just in case it is there's always the newsgroups chiark.mail.yahoo.cambridgefreecycle.*

Suggestions for further filtering welcome.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

You can give away things I thought were unshiftable - my old monitors went out the door last night.
Impressive. I've tried several times to Freecycle CRT monitors and never had any takers.